Sidecar, in collaboration with Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, presents Drawing Room—a two-person exhibition featuring new work by Josh Callaghan and Elizabeth Schwaiger. This marks Callaghan’s fourth exhibition with the gallery and Schwaiger’s first.

Elizabeth Schwaiger’s emphatic paintings and Josh Callaghan’s frenetic sculptures transform the gallery into a drawn room. The voluminous gestures of Schwaiger’s studio portraits create an illusory depth that extends beyond the frame. At the same time, Callaghan’s steel tubes delineate the negative space, lending them the appearance of three-dimensional doodles. Tracing marks and impressions left by forces come and gone, their works give form to the absence of presence.

Painting from archival images of artist studios belonging to artists such as Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, Schwaiger paints rooms poised between creativity and entropy. Her thick, energetic brushstrokes, scrawling gestures, and hueful smears animate the unoccupied interior spaces. Material objects—like canvases, easels, books, stools, and desks—are infused with the intensity and vitality of living entities. Layers of incandescent colors, harmonized in perfect tonal balance, produce a sense of depth and complexity.

In Verdigris 2025, lush, leafy houseplants overtake the manmade environment, visualizing a generative force tipping toward chaos and destruction. Expressive lines loose from representation render the scene abstract and uncanny. This distinction becomes even more pronounced when contrasted with the more figurative portrait of Pablo Picasso’s crowded studio in There Is Nowhere To Remain 2025. Through studios as subject, Schwaiger paints narrative—a sort of alternative portrait of each artist.  

While the pictorial content suggests the existence of the studio’s stewards, the physical quality of the mark-making captures the movements and machinations of the artist herself. Inexhaustible, Schwaiger's paintings appear to continue developing as you look, illuminating the ongoing mystery of the creative process.

A similar dynamism animates Callaghan’s sculptures, crafted from deftly manipulated steel with which the artist seems to dance. It’s easy to imagine one of Schwaiger's quivering painted lines escaping the two-dimensional plane and refashioning itself as one of his twisting metallic forms. Using a vice and a hand bender, Callaghan torques tubing before plating it in brass, chrome, or black nickel. The physicality of the process is preserved in the kinks, twists, and acute angles. These sculptures not only delineate shapes in space but trace the artist’s formal application of force and finesse. Elements such as direction, contour, velocity, and stress afford the industrial material a seemingly organic lifeforce.

By adding chair glides or flag pole finials to the ends of the tubes, Callaghan introduces an additional layer of cultural context and offers the viewer an entry point. The sprawling legs in Cursive Spider Chair 2025 recall daydreaming during homeroom, while Executive Display Structure poses questions about the forces conspiring to distort or deform our nation. In works like Cursive Faun Chair 2025, the functional objects are subsumed by lilting, lyrical gestures that appear on the verge of escaping the constraints of materiality and representation—invoking experiences more akin to music or sudden surges of emotion. 

Both Callaghan and Schwaiger imbue their work with what the philosopher Jacques Derrida might refer to as ‘trace’ or the presence of absence; in this context, that truth which transcends the visible, be it paint or plated steel. 

Josh Callaghan (b. 1969, Doylestown, PA) holds an MFA in New Genres from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of North Carolina Asheville and is a Fulbright Scholar (Nepal). He has exhibited widely, and produced numerous public projects internationally. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Elizabeth Schwaiger (b. 1985, Texas) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received an MFA from Glasgow School of Art and a BA from the University of North Texas. She was a 2019 artist in residence at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in Captiva, Florida. Schwaiger’s painting practice is occupied by a deep fascination with the internal versus the external, and the way in which these boundaries blur within the body, space and time. The interior is often a starting point for Schwaiger. An abandoned household, quiet museum aisle or overflowing artist studio, the spaces she depicts invoke both the material and the ethereal. Energy is a central theme in her practice, which continually explores questions of womanhood, ecology, and the creative and destructive powers of Mother Nature. Expressive brushstrokes of watercolor, acrylic, ink and oil converge on the canvas to create rich compositions. Monochromatic palettes counterbalance this effervescence, completing Schwaiger’s atmospheric worlds in harmonious hues. Solo exhibitions include Now & Now & Now, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Pressing Shadows, Gana Art, Seoul (2023); From the Dark Sea, Jane Lombard, New York (2021) and Darkening Warmth, Co-Lab Projects, Austin, Texas (2020). Group exhibitions include The Selves, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York (2024); Uncanny Interiors, Nicola Vassell Gallery, New York, NY (2022); Unheimlich, Anthem Gallery, San Antonio, TX (2018) and Mystery Portrait Gala, The National Portrait Gallery, London (2017).

Press Release by Tara Anne Dalbow. Installation images by Chris Hanke. Indiviudal artwork images by Nik Massey and Paul Salveson.